Former Gitmo Australian inmate proclaimed innocent – lawyer

Australian David Hicks, known as the "Aussie Taliban (Reuters / David Gray) / Reuters

US authorities have told would-be jihadist David Hicks’ lawyer that the Australian is innocent of the crimes he allegedly committed in Afghanistan in the early 2000s, which cost him six years in Guantanamo prison.

The US conviction was “not correct in law or fact,”
commented Hicks’ lawyer Stephen Kenny, a human rights solicitor
from Adelaide, who has received an official letter from the US
authorities, which couldn’t be released publicly.

“There is no doubt that David Hicks is and has always been
innocent of any crime,” he said, adding that it “was all
but a done deal,” Kenny said, as quoted by news.com.au.

“We are hoping that the military commission will make a
ruling within a month,” Kenny said.

At the same time, the former jihadist should not expect any
compensation from the US government because terror suspects were
captured in the interests of America’s national security.

Native to Adelaide, 39-year-old David Hicks converted to Islam in
2001 and traveled to Afghanistan, where he allegedly underwent
military training at the Al Farouq terrorist camp to join
Al-Qaeda’s ranks. Later in the same year, he was captured by the
Northern Alliance, a resistance force against the Taliban, which
finally handed him over to the Americans, for a bounty.

Because he couldn’t be tried under Afghan or American law, he was
brought to Guantanamo Bay detention camp, where he remained
prisoner from 2001 until 2007.

In 2006 David Hicks was convicted by the US military commission
on charges of providing material support for terrorism in
accordance with the Military Commissions Act of 2006. The
conviction was a result of an Alford plea deal with prosecutors,
in which Hicks accepted one smaller charge - without admitting
guilt - in exchange for a lighter punishment. In the end, Hicks
served only 9 months of a seven year sentence (the Guantanamo
detention did not count towards the term).

In 2007, he was transferred to Australia’s Yatala Prison in
Adelaide, from which he was released under a control order later
the same year.

There is another less known page in David Hicks’ biography. Prior
to converting to Islam, Hicks traveled to Albania in 1999, where
he joined the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) that fought against
Serbian forces during the Kosovo War. Years later the KLA and its
leaders were accused of multiple crimes against humanity.

Chris Kenny, Associate Editor of National Affairs at The
Australian and former chief of staff to Australia's foreign
minister, doesn’t question that incarceration in Guantanamo Bay
was a “harsh and unusual punishment” for the former
chicken-processing worker, but it was “unquestionably Hicks
himself” who brought this on himself when he journeyed from
the “depressed northern suburbs of Adelaide” to the
Afghan mountains.

“Hicks fought with the Kosovo Liberation Army, trained with
terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan, conducted extensive
training with Al-Qaida in Afghanistan, met Osama Bin Laden up to
20 times and was involved in militant missions in Afghanistan,
including guarding tanks at Kandahar airport, while the country
was subject to US bombing raids,” Chris Kenny wrote.

The information wasn’t obtained from confessions, but from his
own letters to his family released by the Australian Federal
Police after his conviction, in which he called Osama Bin Laden,
a "lovely brother" and boasted about being "very
well trained for jihad in weapons."

A US ruling could technically clear David Hicks of assisting
terrorism, but that doesn’t essentially make him “an innocent
abroad,” Chris Kenny said, pointing out that,
“Legislative changes since the age of jihadist terrorism
dawned would make such activities an offence under Australian law
now.”